


a world that wasn't

by wombuttress



Series: CHOOSE [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 04:34:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6641590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wombuttress/pseuds/wombuttress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>side a: Tabris knows this is all she is good for (it fits like an iron maiden).</p><p>side b: Cousland was born to be this (it fits like a hangman's noose).</p><p>Take the rose?<br/>>No<br/>>Yes</p>
            </blockquote>





	a world that wasn't

_side a_

Tabris had decided that there would not be a second night with the assassin, but a woman gets lonely. Ferelden is a cold country, especially so far South. Sometimes, bed warming is exactly what she needs.

It becomes habit, more than anything, and then it becomes more than habit. It becomes like an extra limb, something she could simply not do without.

Or, she could—but strongly prefers not to.

He is warmth and pleasure and sharpness and forgetting. He is comfort, and there is no reason to refuse comfort on such dark days.

Alistair gives her a rose, calls her _a beautiful thing in the darkness._  She stares at it like its poisonous. She flees.

Later, in the dark, with Zevran, she mulls it over and decides that he is wrong. She is not a beautiful thing in the darkness. She is the darkness, and there is nothing beautiful about her, save for the beauty of sharpness, the beauty of a wrecked cart by the side of the road.

Zevran understands. He is like that, too.

The next day she tells Alistair that he is wrong—tersely—and that they are partners, colleagues, professionals. And no more.

Tabris is nothing like a flower. All she has in common with a rose is its thorns. Alistair would do well to remember it, and not to look at her with such soft eyes.

\--

Zevran is shaped like her, she thinks, tracing the contours of him. He is hardly any taller than she is, hardly any broader. She never has to crane her neck to speak to him. His skin is but a shade lighter than hers. The tattoos on his face are not like hers—his are curved blades over cheekbones, and hers are mask-like spikes around her eyes—but they are black and jagged like hers.

He has other tattoos, tattoos all over. She traces them with her ragged fingernails, decides she wants some as well. He laughs and agrees. What shall it be, he asks? A griffon, for the Wardens?

No, she decides, immediately. Do something else.

He adds the designs slowly, all over her, spiky, geometric  designs on her arms and back and legs. After a few months, she looks a little like a thorn bush.

Good.

\--

She crowns Alistair and marries him to a woman he does not love, because it is a good idea. It is wise compromise. Tabris may be angry, may be seething, may be impulsive—but so too is she clever, prudent, cool. She is unmoved by the hurt in his soft eyes, and can't imagine why he'd think she would be.

Tabris does not regret. Tabris does not look back. Tabris has ever done what needed to be done. A creature of thorns is good for that.

That's why she’s the leader, and not Alistair.

Anora is a fine woman. Beautiful, as Tabris is not and never has been. Noble, as Tabris is not and never will be. Much more appropriate.

Alistair will just have to deal with it.

\--

They offer her the post of Warden-Commander. Tabris does not love the Wardens, but Tabris is dutiful, as dutiful as she is resentful of this fact. Tabris serves the time.

But the anger, carried for so long that she can no longer feel its weight, eats at her. She cannot be the commander her recruits deserve. She cannot be anything of use to anyone. So when the time comes to leave, she does not look back.

With the alienage so steeped in tears and blood, and the sad-eyed king on Ferelden’s throne, she can’t imagine she would return to Denerim. Not for long, anyway. She thinks to Antiva, where she has a lover.

It is the only way forward left, so that is where Tabris goes.

\--

Zevran loves her, she realizes one day. In hindsight, it is obvious. It’s in every one of his looks, his touches, in the little gifts he gives her.

She doesn’t know what to make of it, so she doesn’t make anything at all. She lets him love her, and allows him never to speak of it, and of herself, says nothing.

\--

Zevran speaks of grand plans in the naked dark. Take down the Crows. Kill them, ruin them, dismantle the whole organization brick by brick.

Tabris knows nothing but the song of steel and blood, and the hole it fills in her, if but briefly. They kill and they plot and they kill more, and then they go home and fuck the frustration out, and then it’s back to plotting murder and mayhem.

It’s a bitter, violent life, and there is a comfort in the familiar.

At least there is that, Tabris thinks, choking on bile, far from family, far from friends, who are better off without her poison.

At least there is that.

 

                                                                                                                                                _side b_

Gwen doesn’t _mean_ to take the rose, but Alistair is looking at her so earnestly, so honestly, and Gwen has never been good at saying no. She takes it to make him happy, and it works. He seems happy.

He seems happy, too, to gaze at her, to flirt with her—innocently, like a boy—so she lets him. He seems happy to kiss her, and she lets him do that too.

She doesn’t dislike it. A handsome young man, a shining, noble warrior, who seems interested in her. What could possibly be wrong with that? His kisses are sweet and light, they impose nothing. She can’t complain. She doesn't want to lose his friendship.

And if she is curious, about Zevran, about Leliana…well…no matter. Alistair is easy. He is her best friend, her partner, her colleague. Why should he not be her love, as well?

( _Because he is not what you desire,_ something whispers in her, but Gwen ignores it. Since when have her desires meant anything? Since when has she ever had a choice? She doesn’t know how to have a choice anymore.)

\--

Their first night together is the exact disaster Gwen has always feared.

They’re both wearing so much armor, and their hands are shaking so that it’s impossible not to clank. The whole camp must know what they’re doing. When the armor is off, it’s worse, if anything. They’re both bright red, all over.

It goes exactly the way sex between two awkward virgins would be expected to go. It’s over in minutes, and Gwen is feeling vaguely that it was supposed to be different. That she was supposed to feel _something._ But she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t want him to start trying again right now. Maybe not ever.

She listens to him snore in the dark, wondering what she was expecting. Not this, she thinks, but she can’t imagine what.

Maybe it’s like this for everyone, she decides eventually, letting her tired eyes finally drift closed. It hadn't been like that for her parents, but maybe they'd been special, and anyway, they were dead now.

\--

The Landsmeet is a flurry of flubbed, stuttered words, and then of flashing blades, and then Alistair is begging her to let him duel Loghain. It's the wrong choice--some noblewoman's instinct screams _no_ —but she hasn't been able to refuse him so far.

They duel. Gwen flinches her way through it. Loud noises scare her now, and she finds herself not caring how it ends, so long as it does so quickly.

But it ends in Alistair's favor--and before she can say anything, protest, cry out, Loghain’s head is rolling across the court floor, Anora is screaming, and Gwen does not know what to do.

She had meant to let Anora rule. She had meant to free both herself and Alistair from this burden. He didn’t wish to be king, just as she didn’t wish to be _anything._  Anora would have made a fine queen. And if the court felt that Alistair ought marry her--if old blood on the throne, and away from Gwen, was so important--well, she could understand that. _  
_

But Anora is screaming, crying, that she will not marry her father’s murderer, she will _not,_ and nothing Gwen’s leaden tongue can tell her will change her mind. She looks at Anora and knows that should she be Queen again, Alistair will be _dead._

Seized by fear and panic, with all the nobles gazing directly at her, boring into her like sharp-toothed worms, Gwen finds herself speaking the unthinkable— _Alistair will rule, and I will rule by his side._

Somehow, somehow, Gwenivere Cousland is to be married to Alistair Theirin, to be Queen of Ferelden. The nobles are smiling and nodding, agreeing with each other of a wisdom of a Cousland on the throne. They are accepting it. They are making it real.

Gwen might throw up.

\--

The crown is heavy on her head, near as heavy as her wedding ring.

She makes it through the coronation without crying, through the wedding, through the feasting afterwards.

But on the wedding night, in darkness on silk sheets and feathered pillows, the dam bursts, and she sobs like a lost child. Her new husband comforts her, but he can’t understand. He loves her, he loves her, she has to remember that.

They consummate the marriage. He kisses the streaks they have left, kisses her reddened eyes, but there is not use, no use to any of it. They are Wardens, cursed and blighted, corrupted and dying. No life will arise in her womb (and she is glad, so glad).

\--

She is offered the post of Warden-Commander, and practically tears off her silks and jewels to do it, but it’s no good. She ruins that, too. Amaranthine burns, Wardens die, nothing is any use. When the conflict is resolved, Gwen slinks back to Denerim like a dog with its tail between its legs, and hopes desperately that no one will ever ask anything of her again.

A fruitless hope, for a queen.

Alistair defers to her, always. Every council meeting, every diplomatic mission, the king says nothing without the queen’s approval. Gwen is ruling Ferelden alone.

At night she lays beside her husband, exhausted and unable to sleep, and keeps the slowly-building scream inside.

\--

The gowns don’t fit her right, though they have been sewed just for her. The laces are too tight, the brocade doesn’t breathe, the skirt gets tangled in her legs. Her handmaids do her hair, and they yank and pull at it the way her mother never did.

This is the life Gwen has always meant to have, the position her mother must have always wanted for her. Queen of Ferelden, legendary hero, the pride of the nation. A noble warrior, a wise politician. It is familiar, and there is some bitter comfort in that.

At least there is that, Gwen thinks, her neck bent and bowed beneath the weight.

At least there is that.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr](http://gayspacejew.tumblr.com/)   
>  [my oc blog](http://pile-of-dragon-filth.tumblr.com/)


End file.
